A random thought for the day…
Too few people realise that the ICT industry has revenues of nearly $70 billion. Our employment is larger than banking and finance, larger than television, media and communications, larger than mining, and larger than wool, wheat and sugar combined. We are a significant contributor to the social and economic wellbeing of our country.
Why is it then that so few understand how important ICT is?
November 9th, 2007 at 21:39
And why do so many IT departments go Microsoft everything! At work we are supposed to do operational stuff in Linux, but we know more than the people who set it up. The distro that the operational image is based on is really old and sucks purely because it is not set up properly and never updated.
November 11th, 2007 at 01:46
To get people to understand how important it is you first have to get them to understand how to use the actual computer.
November 12th, 2007 at 18:11
I believe that people don’t understand the importance of something unless they understand the workings of it.
Since many do not understand the workings of ITC, the feeling of importance never comes. The best most people tend to get to is the comprehension of the PC Fix professional - the guy that’s tasked with fixing one’s machine. Servers, networking … forget it. In a recent debate I was trying to draw parallels between the invention of the phone network and the Internet. One opponent did not get the reference, “they’re just so different … the internet is a visual medium…”
However, I have encountered quite a few users who were at least appreciative, which is about the best we can hope for at this stage.